Simple Explanations

Those who know me well know that I love politics. Not just domestic politics and not even just International events. For me politics is a manifestation of human behaviour in a larger more flamboyant scale. And I do love studying human behaviour because after all it is human actions that make up life. If you know me we, you also know that I believe the biggest fight of our generation wont be the war against terrorism or drugs, it won't be the fight for civil rights, it will be the right to information. Lack of information drives poor choices and poor choices leave people helpless and in a weaker position to their counterparts.

Last night I was watching a tv show (Backbenches) and a very respected professor said this:

"I’ve got no particular sympathy for Gaddafi but it’s not a morality play; a lot of it is just Americans distracting the world from the fact that the Saudis, to whom they gave $20 billion, are now rolling through Bahrain putting down the rebellion there. And that of course is conveniently dropped out of the news. And point of fact, America doesn’t want any regime to change in the Middle East however dictatorial as long as it’s in their pay. Gaddafi wasn’t of course and he is dispensable. He is a wonderful distraction from what is really going on."


This quote summarises why in 2003 I wrote to my my then local paper in West Lafayaette, Indiana against the US led invasion of Iraq. The U.S. talks the civil rights talk but it walks the self interested resources requirement (oil) walk. The U.S. support for Saudi Arabia is the one reason the Middle East continues to languish in the Middle Ages. While we sit in our comfortable homes, thousands of miles away watching CNN with our superiority complexes of having civil and political rights, we can take little comfort in knowing that eventually the Middle East WILL have those rights that we take for granted but there is much more bloodshed to come and we are the complacent enablers. We are selfish people and is it any wonder that so are our leaders. Individual human behaviour magnified times a gizzilion.